7 Lessons from 7 Product Gurus: 3. Dan Olsen

One thing that separates great product people from the rest is how well they use analytics. Dan Olsen, a startup veteran and leading product voice, shares examples and best practices in lean product analytics and using analytics to optimize your product and business results.

At the end of the day, product people want to always ship products that make an impact for their customers, and their company. Mike Grishaver, Etsy fmr CPO, who’s led revenue-generating product teams and organizations at Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Pandora, and Etsy will share lessons learned about successfully launching impactful and profitable products across a range of monetization models and stages of companies. This talk is aimed to help you navigate the complex world of product development, no matter your current area of focus, and helps you ship products that count.

What does it take for our products to become so essential that we trust them? The best products speak to us from the heart, not the mind, yet state-of-the-art product development optimizes for data, not emotions. Apple Beats Music fmr Product Head Ryan Walsh shares his lessons learned building products that touch us deeply, including the importance of storytelling, the critical role or organizational design, and insights that build trust.

Smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. Hear what LinkedIn fmr Product VP Joff Redfern would have told his younger self to get to where he is in half the time. Joff shares his learning from over 20 years of product leadership experience to help you accelerate your learning and growth in product leadership.

People have lives outside technology. We don’t use our products in a vacuum. But how do you measure the human friction that exists outside your product screens? General Assembly Chief Product Officer Shiren Vijiasingam walks through common traps and pitfalls that even the strongest teams fall into when building products, and offers practical tips to avoid them. Learn how you can build whole product experiences with a few fundamental service design techniques you can implement in your next sprint.

Businesses and product managers love to shout about being “data-driven.” Data is obviously fundamental, but with an industry average conversion rate of 3%, most of our data is internal-facing and biased towards the minority of existing customers who have successfully converted. What about the majority who are non-customers? We are often blind to why non-customers fail, yet break-through products can come from understanding the potential customers who never show up in your dashboards and models. Stop navel gazing and join this session where Chad Jennings will share case studies, frameworks and methods you can use to uncover insights that can drive not only growth but useful, usable and delightful products.

Being today's “Uber for X” works great, some of the time. But following the path of someone else’s success doesn’t always get the results you want or expect. Come hear stories from the front lines of trying – and often failing – in applying someone else’s business model, product strategy, and management style. There’s a lot to learn from and be inspired by in others’ success, when you know how to apply it the right way.

How do you reconcile vision and execution? Netflix Former Product VP Gibson Biddle shares the two models he uses to define product strategy and answer the question, “How do we delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?” He’ll then share how he puts the strategy into practice via carefully defined metrics and tactics. Last, he’ll simulate a product strategy meeting, demonstrating the fast-paced “debate, decide, then do” environment at Netflix as he presents two modern-day, Netflix mini-cases.

Learning how to drive growth is a major key to the success of a business - but it is also equally as important to learn how to analyze and attribute that growth in order to understand key drivers and continue growth momentum. Pulling from his experience growing and leading the product teams at Instacart, Wealthfront, and LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler will take the stage to discuss best tactics for analyzing growth, identifying what worked and what did not, and how to build a strategy around those findings to replicate the effects and ensure continued growth.

How do you create a roadmap when your team and customers are scattered around the world? It's hard to keep everyone aligned and involved when key people are located in different time zones. TransferWise's North American product head Josh Aziz shares best practices that allow product managers to automate their work down to every detail, allowing you to focus on your product's impact and making sure everyone is behind your vision.

About the speaker: Josh Aziz is the Product Manager for TransferWise North America. He leads the product strategy and vision for the U.S. and Canada. He works alongside a team of banking and compliance experts, customer support specialists, and engineers to transform how money moves around the world, and make financial services cheaper, more transparent, and more convenient for everyone.

Agile transformations are about people. Frameworks and practices can help, but a successful transformation starts and ends with the individuals, teams and leaders who bring the change to life. One of the most powerful tools you already have for facilitating change is your vocabulary and your word choice. eBay exec and Agile Alliance board member Paul Hammond reveals how to create strong foundations for a strong agile transformation through careful consideration and selection of your team or organizational agile vocabulary.

What if chronic diseases weren't actually chronic? What if everything we’ve been told about healthcare is wrong? Virta Health founding CEO, former co-founder of Trulia, and world-class athlete Sami Inkinen reveals the 5 principles that can disrupt healthcare and end diabetes. Sami is a returning guest at Products That Count, where he previously talked about how to achieve the impossible— literally: what most people think is impossible. Once again, he set out to do just that! From systems building to applications of artificial intelligence to exponential thinking, Sami offers practical wisdom from a remarkable life and career.

What makes some products so engaging while others flop? Nir Eyal explains the psychology behind the world’s most habit-forming technologies and provides practical advice for increasing user engagement.

Successful product managers help their organizations identify and build magical products that solve their users’ needs. While finding the perfect user-product fit is rarely easy, trained product managers can find great fits consistently through User Science–understanding both user needs (identifying which problem to solve) and user behaviors (understanding how and why users react to products). Brent Tworetzky (CPO of XO Group, which includes The Knot) walks you through a simple system that brings User Science to life for you and your team.

Master the art of prototyping by learning to apply six core principles honed by Oculus Design Engineering Head Caitlin Kalinowski. Distilling 15+ years shipping products, she shares examples of how these principles can help you to turbocharge your product's development and focus your team on the right things at the right time. She also shares management secrets that pair best with each stage of development and iteration to keep your product on track.

Software is hard. Getting the product right is challenging enough, and unless you're working alone, you're contending with people and process in a daily struggle to get things done. As product builders, how do we guarantee excellence when so much can go wrong? Slack product lead Paul Rosania gives an overview of the many risks that face software teams, and a recipe for building exceptional products.

Paul Rosania leads the Core Product team at Slack, where he and his team build the interfaces millions of people use to get their work done each day. Previously, he led the Timelines Team at Twitter, where he spearheaded the transition to an algorithmically ranked feed. Paul graduated Dartmouth College with a BA in Computer Science and has spent the last decade building software he hopes brings people closer together.

The success of a product is increasingly defined by the 'why' someone will use a product, over the 'how' it should be built. But how do you get people to care? How do you go about showing people why they must use your product. The Times and The Sunday Times fmr-product head Paul Jackson explores the drivers of that 'Aha' moment, including the 9x challenge of new product adoption.

As a Product Manager and user-centred design practitioner, Paul Jackson has been building digital products and services for over 15 years. Currently Managing Director of Castle in the UK, he was Head of Product Management for The Times and The Sunday Times and Director of Product at Newsmart, an edtech SaaS that leverages premium news content from the Wall Street Journal. Paul is the publisher of Pivot Product Hits, a monthly newsletter on product strategy and a regular writer on all things product.

Teams do their best work, collaborate more efficiently, and are highly motivated when there are clear metric goals that are aligned with the company mission. Unfortunately many teams struggle with setting goal metrics that drive meaningful product outcomes, align stakeholder incentives, or allow teams to execute rapidly with a clear purpose. Instagram growth lead Bangaly Kaba shares his attributes of good metrics, discuss how to align and prioritize team metrics to topline goals, highlight common risks and mistakes, and share how he applies these frameworks to a couple real life products.

About the speaker: Bangaly Kaba leads the Growth Team at Instagram, leading the growth efforts for its core app. He's been at Facebook for over 3 years and previously worked on Facebook's Growth Team as the PM for Friending, the team responsible for building the social graph. Prior to FB, Bangaly drove new product ideation for DirecTV's Digital Innovation Lab, launched a couple startups, and also worked on Wall Street.

How do you go about launching products that attract millions of users? How do you go from ZERO to 1 MILLION users? Serial mobile entrepreneur and member of Facebook's Client Council, Joel Freeman shares his experience bringing fast growing apps to market and reveals what he learned along the way, including how to effectively design for virality and retention, how to maximise organic growth and invest in scaling paid opportunities, and what the future of the Appstore looks like.

About the speaker: Joel Freeman is co-Founder and CEO of Grabble & Mobula. He has launched services that have reached millions of users and ha ve been featured by Apple in over 100 countries. Interested in starting businesses from a young age, which led to an accidental delivery of 1m playing cards in London Bridge with no means to distribute them, Joel is obsessed with the future of mobile. He sits on the Facebook Client Council and strategizes about the future of native app distribution.

Marketplaces are changing the way we work, buy, travel and more. Their business model could well be the best ever: it’s powered by network effects at scale, where supply and demand follow one another, creating a winner-take-all situation. But why will one marketplace gain traction and achieve scale, where others falter? How do you build a winning one? Eventbrite Growth VP and marketplace guru Brian Rothenberg shares what he learned through more than a decade building 4 marketplaces from $0 to $billions.

Brian Rothenberg has spent the last four years playing a critical role in scaling Eventbrite’s business to millions of events per year, generating more than $5Bn in gross transactions since inception. Prior to Eventbrite, Brian helped to multiply TaskRabbit’s business 3x, he co-founded and ran product & marketing for his own marketplace startup SkillSlate (acquired by TaskRabbit), and started his career as a product manager for Yahoo!’s marketplace businesses.

Products That Count is one of the largest communities of product managers, leaders and founders in the world. It provides insider access to founders and C-level execs such as Netflix Product VP, Crossing the Chasm legendary author, Trulia Founder, or Lyft CMO, via speaker series, podcasts, and invite-only executive retreats. Partners include WeChat, Yelp, LeanPlum, Pragmatic Marketing, and StartupDigest. Its venture arm, Mighty Capital, invests in companies building products that count once they have demonstrated product/market fit. More at ProductsThatCount.com.